Close to a year ago we sent an application to the tax authority requesting that Lydia’s last name be changed. There are a few reasons we did this, the most compelling (in my opinion) being that we don’t want her to be the only one in the family with a different last name.

After a couple of weeks, we got a letter back saying that her name couldn’t be changed without the approval of her biological father. Unless we could get his consent, our only recourse was to appeal to the court system and hope they agreed that a name change is in Lydia’s best interest. So I fired off a letter to the courts, paid a fifty-dollar processing fee, and settled in for a long wait.

In March Lydia was summoned for a chat with a social worker and allowed to express her feelings on the issue. A couple of weeks after that, we got a copy of the social worker’s letter to the courts, which recommended that Lydia keep her current last name. I got the impression from reading the report that the caseworker didn’t really understand the situation (for instance, he repeatedly referred to the biological father as “Lydia’s dad,” which to her means Olof; anything she said about her “dad” would have referred to Olof rather than her bio-father, a distinction it seems the caseworker missed).

Next up for consideration were statements from my ex and his mother and sister (the court had sent him a letter notifying him of the name-change request). It came as no surprise to me that their letters were full of lies (such as that he had “raised Lydia” until I moved her to Sweden, and that we had visited the States without bothering to contact any of them), but it irritated me nonetheless. Irritation aside, however, those letters did little, if anything, to damage our case, since they focused much more on the grevious wrong I had done them than on the issue of the name change. Even so, Olof wrote a rebuttal letter to clarify a few points and sent it on to the courts.

This last was in April, and we hadn’t heard anything since then. Then, on Tuesday, I got an envelope in the mail from the court system. I knew right away what it was, and it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I opened it. Between the social worker’s recommendation against the name change and the bio-father’s objections, my hopes for a favorable judgment weren’t high.

It took me a number of moments, and at least three re-reads, then, before I grasped what I read on the first page:

“[D]et är förenligt med Lydias bästa att hon får anta efternamnet Tjerngren.”

Or, in other words, “NAME CHANGE APPROVED.” Cue surprise and delight!

The only thing left to do was to send in a new request to the tax authority and do a little more waiting. We sent the paperwork that same day, and with any luck the waiting bit won’t take too long. It will be such a relief to have it all over and done with.